Workshop: who was this written for?
Ākonga determine purpose and audience for their own text and cite the features that reveal it.
- Reading Workshop move: Audience judgement from textual features
- Evidence it produces: A stated audience with three features that indicate it
Route status: the learning intentions and mini-lesson scaffold are shared with the seminar route; the Do Now, activities, conferences, evidence and exit below are this route’s own. The difference is how ākonga work — their own chosen texts, individual evidence, and one-to-one conferencing — not which strategies are taught.
Lesson 8: Evaluating Text Purpose & Target Audience
Building confident, active readers through Te Ao Māori perspectives, comprehension strategies, and rich Aotearoa texts.
🎯 Ngā Whāinga Akoranga | Learning Intentions
Authorial purpose (to inform, persuade, entertain, instruct, explain), target audience profiling (age, background, interest), and how tone/language adapt for different audiences.
Determine author purpose across various text formats (advertisements, news reports, poetry, pūrākau), analyse tone, and profile target audiences.
⚡ Whakaoho | Do Now: Who did your author think you were? (8 mins)
Open your own text. Who did the author imagine reading it — age, knowledge, interests? Write your profile of that imagined reader with one clue from the page that supports it. Not the topic: the language.
🔬 Activity 1: Profile two texts you know (22 mins)
Take your own text and one more text you know well from the class library — the more different, the better. For each, work out purpose (inform, persuade, entertain, instruct, explain) and target audience, with the rule that every judgement must cite language evidence: sentence length, vocabulary choices, what the author bothers to explain versus assumes, how the reader is addressed. Two texts, two evidence-backed profiles.
Then the transfer question: rewrite the opening line of one of your texts for a completely different audience. What did you have to change?
🪑 While they work: reading conferences (run through Activity 1 mins)
Confer one-to-one with four or five ākonga — the rewrite reveals more than the profile; start there if time is short. Keep each conference under four minutes and record one line per learner on your conference sheet: text, strategy seen, next move. Everyone else keeps working — the conference is a conversation about their book, not a test.
Conference questions for this lesson:
- What in the language — not the topic — tells you the audience?
- What does your author assume the reader already knows? Show me where.
- In your rewrite, what changed first: vocabulary, sentence shape, or tone? Why that?
📝 Activity 2: Journal — audience grid (15 mins)
Complete Section 8 of your Reading Journal: the purpose-and-audience grid for your two texts, each cell backed by quoted language evidence, plus your rewritten opening line with a note on what you changed and why.
🚪 Exit (5 mins)
Your strongest audience clue of the day: the quoted language feature and what it told you.
🏫 Kaiako Planning & Pedagogy Notes
Curriculum alignment: Te Mātaiaho, English, Phase 3 (Years 7–8). This lesson builds comprehension, critical literacy and cultural connectedness through Aotearoa literature and pūrākau. The unit's one verified Te Mātaiaho anchor is recorded on the curriculum companion; no further statement is claimed for this lesson until one is verified.